The moment I knew The Blood of Dawnwalker had it came when, not far in, one of the local peat diggers fell into a big hole. Tasked with finding him by his brother at the start of what seemed a fairly mundane early fetch quest, I rolled my eyes a bit as I slid in to try and locate the poor sod. He was, predictably, cowering in a corner of the cave complex. Right, now to get out of here and claim a lifetime supply of partially decayed vegetation.
Wait, what was that noise? I’ll not spoil the rest of the quest, but suffice it to say that it provided the first taste of Rebel Wolves’ vampire RPG offering the same sort of memorable adventure as the series many of its devs cut their teeth on - CD Projekt’s Witcher and Cyberpunk games.
The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Witcher DNA is obvious. It has a detective-style focus mode that highlights things in the world you should investigate or follow in yellow, just like Geralt’s witcher senses do. Its daytime combat mixes sword swipes that only do damage if an enemy isn’t blocking with parries, dodges, and recharging magical abilities that provide an extra edge in a similar fashion to a witcher’s signs. One of those magical abilities also allows Coen to briefly reanimate corpses in order to interrogate them, much like Yennefer does in that Witcher 3 quest about the cursed garden in Skellige. Dawnwalker also has vampires who rip and tear through foes with long claws and can zip around or climb unassailable structures as clouds of mist.
If you told someone watching you play it that it’s a CD Projekt spin-off called The Witcher: Blood of Dawnwalker, developed because someone there fancied making an entry in that series without a cat-eyed medieval fantasy pest controller as protagonist, you’d have no trouble convincing them. Aside from not being totally ancient, the game's bright-eyed 14th century peasant hero, Coen, plays like you might expect Witcher 3 Blood and Wine vamps Regis and Detlaff to if they were the lead. He does have a chink in his armour compared to those two, though. In the daytime, Coen’s human, with his vampiric powers only kicking in once the sun goes down. Thus, the game splits itself into a day and night cycle, with each made up of six segments of time which tick away a certain amount on completing a quest or activity, some of which are only available while the sun or moon are out.
By night, you move like a supernatural force, warping and whipping around terrified foes in a frenzy of blood-fuelled power fantasy. So throbbing are you with crimson vigor that you face the peril of having your destructive craving for the red stuff overwhelm you mid-conversation either because you’ve chosen that option, or simply because you’ve let your health dip low enough that your body decides it needs a sanguine boost. That said, I’ve found it pretty easy to avoid having this result in accidental drainings of friendly NPCs - both by regularly snacking on animals in the wilderness whenever my segments of life force were close to empty, and by leaving a lot of the talking-heavy activities to daytime Coen. As such, aside from the few times guards have spotted me teleporting onto a rooftop and a chase through the streets has ensued, I’ve never felt much like Coen’s dark gift comes with much of a curse. Well, I say that, but sometimes the teleportation can lead to rather janky-looking climbs, especially while warping up jagged cliffs - though I’m not sure if there’s a way the devs could have filed this away without adding guardrails that blunted the fundamental fun of whooshing about.
Instead, the curse often feels like it kicks in whenever you have to fight large groups or tough foes in human form. Rather than the rapid darting in and out of claw strike range you can lean on in vampire form, human Coen’s fighting style is much more upright and rigid. He carries a single sword to swing at foes and in between has to either dodge their blows while looking for free hits, or do some directional parrying to evade damage and create openings in their blocking. To put it diplomatically, timed parrying has long been a weakness of mine, which proved to be a problem since it seems to be the route the game prefers you take. Coen’s dodge in vampire form is an energetic slink out of harm’s way, but his dodge in human form often feels like more of a shrug, sometimes barely moving him if the terrain underfoot has any jagged edges, or the manoeuvre risks brushing close to a wall.
I have largely gotten used to it as I’ve progressed and perked out Coen to better suit my strengths, though, so it’s certainly not as stark a dealbreaker for the parry-averse as it might be in a Souls game or something similarly unyielding. Earning a perk which granted passive health regeneration while in human form was also a godsend. If you are planning to get into big scraps during the daytime, you’ll want that perk and also likely to put plenty of points into Coen’s witchcraft abilities. While they often come with a sacrifice of some health, as is the case with some vampire abilities, being able to, for example, passively tick a foe’s health away via the Burning Blood ability is key in thinning out groups without getting overwhelmed. Keeping a stock of food and salves for healing is also key, and an important differentiator from the vampire form, which automatically regenerates health while relying on feeding on humans or animals for bigger boosts. You can have a mid-fight snack in the latter case, offering the satisfying double boon of weakening a foe while building you back up.
As with The Witcher and its nine million craftable oils aimed at making you marginally more effective against certain monsters, there’s plenty of finer detail and minmaxing you can get into if you wish, but I’d also say the combat’s accessible enough for those who don’t put together a spreadsheet spelling out their level-up point distribution plans in advance.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-blood-of-dawnwalker-review-worthy-to-sip-blood-at-the-top-rpgs-table
